


The Mutiny

by Happyorogeny



Series: The Illidari [2]
Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Death Mention, Gen, medical procedure mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-24
Updated: 2018-02-24
Packaged: 2019-03-23 04:15:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13779474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Happyorogeny/pseuds/Happyorogeny
Summary: The Illidari of the Black Temple take a greater role in the creation and care of new hunters.





	The Mutiny

A new demon hunter was being born. This involved even more blood and screaming than the normal kind of birth. 

While the rite usually took place in the dead of night, the whispers spread through the Black Temple like wildfire. Who it was, where they came from, their chances of surviving. 

Altruis came to wake her up.

Kor'vas lashed out at him as he put a hand on her shoulder and only his quick reflexes saved him from a fatal neck would. She bounced up on her bed and hissed, wings spread so as to make herself appear larger. 

He bristled but gave her a few minutes to wake up properly. She shook herself.

“I thought you were going to attack me!” The last time she’d woken up to a hunter in her room it had been Alak turned traitor, yelling about how Illidan had lied and led them astray, how the Legion’s victory was inevitable and their only chance was to join them. He wouldn’t come back no matter how much they shrieked at him. In the end, Lord Illidan had killed him and withdrawn to his inner sanctum for a week. 

“Come sleep with us in the rain room.” New Illidari were given small rooms in the far wing, to allow them privacy and space to recover from their harrowing. Separate quarters also prevented them from fighting with each other until they got their new hunter-fighter instincts under control. But of late many of them had taken to dozing in their rain garden instead. The presence of others seemed to soothe them, and they had folk to chatter at when they jerked awake from nightmares. And if company was too much, their rooms were a quiet place to retreat to.

“I’ll do as I please. Why’d you wake me up?”

“There’s light in the courtyard. They say it’s Allari.”

Kor'vas grabbed her cloak off her bed. They weren’t supposed to interact too closely with the acolytes. But Kor'vas couldn’t help it, drifting into their camp in the dead of night and peering at them as they slept. What were their stories? How did they all make their way here? Why did some of them die? Why did some survive only to succumb to their demons? 

Allari seemed strong. She wept often, but so did all surviving Illidari. They wept and laughed and snarled far easier than they had before. They remained themselves, but with every reaction heightened to match their new senses. Kor’vas had to admit, she enjoyed the freedom. It was nice to laugh when she felt like it, scream when she wanted to scream, weep when she was sad. 

Officially they weren’t allowed to attend a new Rite, or stray too close to the newly fledged. The rite was a taxing, violent process. A demon hunter came out ready to fight. She had taken an intense dislike to Akama. Lord Illidan had let her chase him around the courtyard a bit before intervening.

The initial spike of aggression eased off as a hunter regained control of themselves, although they remained more belligerent that the general population. A person had to be hostile, to chase a demon for days, to fight through their own pain and use it to savage their enemies.

A lot of them now found themselves prone to exploration, seeking nooks and crannies and escape routes. Salesh had discovered part of the roof in the wing had given way, allowing a careful hunter out onto an upper balcony where they could watch the rites. He didn’t talk anymore and seemed a little simple-minded, but he darted through the dark hallways now and knocked on each door as he went, gathering everyone.

A dozen heads turned as she stepped into the hall, drawing her cloak around her. The other hunters glowed with fel energy in her sight, and Jace had marked the edges of the corridor with blue mana chalk so that no one bumped into the walls.

Though they were often loud, they knew this to be a mission and fell into single file behind Salesh, orderly as priests. Kayn bared his teeth at Alturis briefly but there was nary a hiss to be heard. Kor’vas kept a hand on the wall to guide herself as they made their way forwards. 

The screaming started just as they crawled out onto the roof. Allari sounded as furious as she was afraid as she was in pain. The entire courtyard blazed with green light from the runic circle. Kor’vas felt her hackles going up at the brimstone-blood smell of demon. A muffled growl ran through the group and several scuffles broke out around her as half of them tried to jump forwards to attack.

Allari struggled against a dark, multi-armed figure. Her ears went flat with concern. Shivarra initiates were rare and very susceptible to Legion-fall. 

Illidan prowled along the edge of the warded circle. Kor'vas leaned forwards, trying to overhear him. Marius grabbed her wing least she fall off the roof.

“Did you come this far to fail?” Their Master spoke demonic, testing the unknowing Allari to see if she understood.

“It doesn’t die! It just won’t die!” She answered in common. But she seemed to have understood the question. Surely that was a good omen.

“Battle it down.”

She shrieked in protest, hurling a stone at the demon and scrabbling away to the edge of the ring. 

“I’m not a fighter!”

“Overmaster it. You’ve suffered more than this monster could ever dream. Wield that pain.”

“They’ll never stop!” Anger gave way to terror. Kor’vas couldn’t quite see beyond the general haze of magic, but she thought Allari’s eyes might be burning as the demon terrorised her with visions of all the worlds it had conquered.

"Neither will we.”

The burning blindness was worse than the knife. The knife was fast. Allari fell to her knees, clutching at her head and shrieked at the shivarra as it loomed over her.

“All those people! How could you? How dare you!”

The shivarra summoned a wicked scythe and stabbed her through the chest. 

Kor’vas gasped and grabbed for Marius’s hand. The Illidari went stiff and mute in protest, a dozen muffled screams making the air creak around them.

Allari cried out, but it was no death rattle. It was a war-scream. She forced herself up along the blade and jammed her thumbs into the demon’s eyesocket’s, dragging her head down. 

“This is what it feels like to watch your children die!”

Kor’vas couldn’t help it. She stood.

“Finish her off!”

Allari set her ears right back and twisted the shivarra’s head, weathering the blows the demon rained upon her.

“How dare you?” She hissed and it was demonic that dripped off her tongue. “Shame on you!”

Illidan tilted his head slightly towards them but said nothing. The other Illidari took this as blatant permission to continue and their silence burst like a dam beneath monsoon floodwaters.

“Keep going! Allari! Keep going!” Half of them cried out in support of her as the other half jeered at the demon;

“Shame on you! Shame!”

“How dare you!”

“Shame!”

They were all too enraptured to notice Altruis nudge Jace, to notice the two men slip away.

Increment by slow increment Allari wrestled the demon down. Kor’vas flipped her wings open in excitement as she heard something snap in the monsters back. She almost had it! Just a little more!

“Enough!” The shivarra roared and straightened herself with an almighty surge of strength, sending Allari flying to bounce against the wards at the edge of the circle.

“No!” Kor’vas shrieked. The shivarra turned on Lord Illidan and bared her teeth in the semblance of a smile.

“Your struggles are that of dying flesh. Kil’jaden will have you again.”

“No, he won’t.” Their Master sounded remarkably serene. “No one will.” 

For behind her Allari rose to her feet, bloody and furious. 

“How dare you.”

The Illidari shrieked in delight, their voices merging and rolling over the courtyard in a wave for they recognised in her the Beyond. Beyond pain, beyond fear, beyond death itself, the serenity they passed into where their own agony brought healing, where they would fight and bleed until their enemy drowned in it. 

Allari dragged the scythe free of her chest and Kor’vas swore she had reached out to help her do it. She felt the weapon fall into her hand as if it had always belonged there. When Allari leaped to attack the shivarra, they all leaped with her. 

“Shame on you!”

The eruption of light blinded them. Even their Master turned his head away as a fountain of green light burst up from within the circle, burning rapidly to white, and then to gold.

The Illidari moved as one, gliding down into the courtyard as the light receded. Their Master rumbled at them warningly and they shied back, but stood on their toes to peer forwards into the circle.

Allari was there. But she lay upon her back, perfectly still, her eyes black.

No!

Lord Illidan’s hooves echoed against the courtyard walls as he walked to the bisected remnants of the shivarra. His talons made swift work of her chest cavity and he stood clutching a dripping, twitching heart. Kor’vas finally found her voice.

“She can’t be dead!”

“Everything can be killed. Including you. Including me.” He spread his wings over Allari. “But she lives.” 

Sure enough she stirred as he squeezed a trickle of demon blood onto her face and coughed, putting a hand to her chest. Only a thin white scar remained where the demon had run her through. Her eyes flickered and settled into a steady emerald blaze as she sat up and snatched the heart from Illidan’s claws, mantling her wings protectively as she ate.

The rite left a person hungry. Kor’vas remembered it well. The Broken tattoo artist had tried to take her food from her and she’d near torn his throat out. Speaking of, the sooner they got her to the artist, the better. The tattoos helped clarity return, wretched and painful an experience as it was.

Lord Illidan hadn’t driven them off, despite their arrival shattering the accepted procedures. Instead he had stepped back and watched closely as they moved forwards, spreading around their new sibling in a loose circle. She hissed at them uncertainly but seemed to relax when they sat down and didn’t stare at her directly.

This was better, Kor’vas thought, pulling her cloak around herself and leaning into Asha to have her hair braided. This was better than secrecy and darkness and someone fighting for their life all alone.

Jace and Altruis had reappeared, clutching a small metal box and the tarp that the tattoo artist put down under them. Kor’vas wrinkled her nose at the smell of it and felt her hackles go up. That old Broken artist was a sadist at best. They were all quite sure he hurt them on purpose. Jace had been touching up their tattoos for the last few weeks.

Surely he knew enough, they all knew enough between them, to etch the runes themselves?

The Lord of Outland watched them glide to a halt with a displeased expression. Jace was usually a calm man, but Kor’vas could smell blood and see his knuckles gleam where they were split open. Altruis bore similar wounds.

“Explain your actions.”

Altruis hesitated a moment before bowing low.

“This should be something we do ourselves, hunters to hunters. Our births ought to be our own, our rites, our markings ought not be etched upon us by people that would as soon see us dead.”

Kor’vas noticed their Lord didn’t correct Altruis, didn’t reassure him that they were safe and that the old artist meant no harm. Tylus spoke up from the far side of their circle.

“Jace can do it. He fixed the runes upon my back when the ink began to run.” He quailed faintly under their Master’s gaze as he turned to study said markings, burning eyes narrow.

“This requires care. Her very life depends on placing each marking perfectly.” 

Jace’s voice was remarkably soft for such a big man.

“I will mix the felfire ink with the blood of the shivarra, for harmonic resonance within her. I will add an anticoagulant so that the ink doesn’t clot.” He turned his gaze on Allari, who growled at him. “I can see the magic settling into patterns under her skin. We can all see where the tattoos must be placed. My hands will be guided by the many.”

Salesh had wriggled up to Allari on his stomach and was deftly daubing shivarra blood onto her rib cage and legs. That was a fine idea, creating a temporary focus for the fel magic seething through her. She grumbled at him, but seemed too hungry to be bothered chasing him off. 

“We can feed Allari as we work, calm her, restrain her if need be.” Jace made as if to step forwards, but stopped as their Master turned to him.

“Are you prepared to kill her for your pride?”

Altruis’s voice was stiff as he spoke.

“Not pride. We deserve some dignity in this, and companionship from our own kind.” He was one of the few that could meet and endure Illidan’s burning gaze. “We have lived through this – we know the rite, we know the tattoos, we know the magic. We know ourselves.”

Lord Illidan looked at Allari, who hadn’t yet tried to kill any of them though the fel burned hot in her veins. He looked at Jace and his steady, bloody, careful hands. He looked at Kor’vas, who had first cried out so that Allari knew she wasn’t alone.

He opened his wings.

“Her fate is in your claws. Handle it well. I will keep the courtyard clear.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this work, check out the rest of my writing and find me at https://happyorogeny.tumblr.com/writing


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